The New Yorker Profiles iPhone And PlayStation Jailbreaker George Hotz “GeoHot”

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When it comes to hacking iPhone, the most famous name that comes to everyone’s mind is George Hotz as known as GeoHot.

The first person to unlock the iPhone device. He later released many jailbreaking tools including the Purplera1n, BlackRa1n and LimeRa1n. Geo Hot then left iPhone jailbreaking and later he made a come back by jailbreaking PlayStation which was followed by legal action against him by Sony. After that he started doing jon in Facebook for some time.

Newyorker.com has updated a detailed profile of him covering many stories:

After weeks of research with other hackers online, Hotz realized that, if he could make a chip inside the phone think it had been erased, it was “like talking to a baby, and it’s really easy to persuade a baby.”
He used a Phillips-head eyeglass screwdriver to undo the two screws in the back of the phone. Then he slid a guitar pick around the tiny groove, and twisted free the shell with a snap. Eventually, he found his target: a square sliver of black plastic called a baseband processor, the chip that limited the carriers with which it could work. To get the baseband to listen to him, he had to override the commands it was getting from another part of the phone. He soldered a wire to the chip, held some voltage on it, and scrambled its code. The iPhone was now at his command. On his PC, he wrote a program that enabled the iPhone to work on any wireless carrier.

The next morning, Hotz stood in his parents’ kitchen and hit “Record” on a video camera set up to face him. He had unruly curls and wispy chin stubble, and spoke with a Jersey accent. “Hi, everyone, I’m geohot,” he said, referring to his online handle, then whisked an iPhone from his pocket. “This is the world’s first unlocked iPhone.”

Hotz’s YouTube video received nearly two million views and made him the most famous hacker in the world. The media loved the story of the teen-age Jersey geek who beat Apple. Hotz announced that he was auctioning off the unlocked phone. The winning bid, from the C.E.O. of Certicell, a cell-phone-refurbishing company, was a 2007 Nissan 350Z sports car and three new iPhones. Later, on CNBC, Erin Burnett asked Hotz if he thought that day’s uptick in Apple stock was due in part to his efforts. “More people want iPhones now if they can use them with any sort of provider,” he said, and added that he “would love to have a talk right now with Steve Jobs” about it.

Apple and A.T. & T. remained conspicuously silent. Unlocking a phone was legal, but it could enable piracy. Many hardware manufacturers sell the devices at a loss, recovering the costs through monthly contracts or software sales. When Steve Jobs was asked at a press conference about the unlocked iPhone, he smiled awkwardly and said, “This is a constant cat-and-mouse game that we play. . . . People will try to break in, and it’s our job to keep them from breaking in.” Hotz never heard directly from Jobs.

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who hacked telephone systems early in his career, sent Hotz a congratulatory e-mail. “It was like a story out of a movie of someone who solves an incredible mystery,” Wozniak told me. “I understand the mind-set of a person who wants to do that, and I don’t think of people like that as criminals. In fact, I think that misbehavior is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought.”